Design Observer :: Join the Discussion http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/ en-us Design Observer Group 2011-08-12T17:51:34-05:00 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0
1. Warhol was another incomer, just one of the many expecting gratification and recognition for his work, two reasons why people move to large urban centers. His engagement in the artistic community just happened to "color" the artistic environment of that era in a city like New York. He had a particular disengagement that was characterized his style and persona. It was an attitude, not some urban philosophy by any means. He was above all, a celebrity phenomena, and those haven't stopped filling the roster of characters that make a city worth living.

2. New Urbanism works best for making something out of nothing, new neighborhoods in places where there were none before. You can loosely follow Jacob ideas and do something that is well meaning and livable, but that is not what Jacobs was necessarily aiming at. Her work is centered on keeping the dynamics of established neighborhoods very much alive.

3. Privacy and freedom are some of the reasons why people moved to cities, along with better pay, career options and places to visit. But it serves to know your neighborhood well, unless you really want to walk even more, and neither you have to feel some kind of pie in the sky adulation for it, hefty taxes will take that notion out of your head fast.

]]> Maria Ayub http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-08-12T17:51:34-05:00 I live in a little city in New England. When I read the local paper I often wonder about issues this essay may have shed a little light on; why there are problems with a planned housing development, different attitudes towards changes in neighborhoods; how different people living together deal with each other and changes to their communities.
As one of America's violently shamed know-nothingist caste, I thought Tim could have cut a few of those 150 word sentences in half. Though I only have a peasant's undergraduate education, I enjoyed reading this. I liked the little hash marks in the scroll bar on the side of the essay. It made it easy to jump between comments, end notes and the body of the essay. Oh, I loved that reference to the panopticon; thank goodness for Google. Matt Anson. ]]> matt anson http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-08-08T09:18:38-05:00
Other commenters have made similar points, and I agree with most of them, so here are some contrasting quotes from Mennil and Jacobs:

--Mennil: "Jacobs failed to see the value of impersonality in the city"
--Jacobs: "Cities are full of people with whom, from your viewpoint, or mine, or any other individual's, a certain degree of contact is useful or enjoyable; but you do not want them in your hair. And they do not want you in theirs either....The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts.... Most of it is utterly trivial, but the sum of it is not trivial at all.... The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized. and above all, it implies no private commitments." (Emphasis hers)

--Mennil: "It does not diminish the value of the Jacobsian social environment to point out that it posits a healthy neighborhood as a kind of panopticon, with a decided lack of privacy and anonymity."
--Jacobs: "Privacy is precious in cities. It is indispensable. Perhaps it is precious and indispensable everywhere, but most places you cannot get it. In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not--only those you choose to tell will know much about you."

--Mennil: "The creation of a genuine and effective community... requires... a shared sense of purpose. But in truly complex cities shaped by myriad agendas and diverse populations, such shared purposes tend to arise only among communities of narrowly like-minded individuals"
--Jacobs: "Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense."

--Mennil: "The true flaw in Jacob's concept of the city, however, is not that she envisions a big-city neighborhood as a small town but that her libertarianism supports the fantasy that urban dwellers will self-interestedly choose that communitarian world over any other; her faith in instinctive cooperation and socially sustaining behavior in contemporary American cities verges on the starry-eyed. This unrealistic expectation of human behavior might in part underlie the partial or complete failure of so many attempts to build communities based on her ideals. "
--Jacobs: "Lately a few planners, notably Reginald Isaacs of Harvard, have daringly begun to question whether the conception of neighborhood in big cities has any meaning at all. Isaacs points out that city people are mobile. They can and do pick and choose from the entire city (and beyond) for everything from a job, a dentist, recreation, or friends, to shops, entertainment, or even in some cases their children's schools. City people, says Isaacs, are not stuck with the provincialism of a neighborhood, and why should they be? Isn't wide choice and rich opportunity the point of cities? This is indeed the point of cities."

--Mennil: "Warhol did not promote the idea of community, yet he helped create the actual thing, even if his wasn't the kind of community that Jacobs or most contemporary planners might endorse."
--Jacobs: "Neighborhoods in cities need not supply for their people an artificial town or village life, and to aim at this is both silly and destructive."

In summary, Jacobs valued privacy, at least as much as Warhol, and Jacobs was not trying to make communities - she isn't Andres Duany - she was trying to make cities. Diverse, varied, open-to-all, but also safe Cities. Too bad Mennil didn't understand that before he wrote a book about her.]]> Patrick Sewell http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-06-21T14:09:39-05:00
Jacobs argued that urban anonymity gave you freedom from obligatory community of proximity and the freedom to find a community of compatibility.

Some like to think that Jacobs showed that the city, or the city with "eyes on the street" leads to some sort of cloying community for all, but she was harder than that. One result of the loss of the the community of proximity is that some will find no community at all, and live in urban isolation, perhaps shunned by the cool kids or just lost, without the safety net of the community of proximity. Such is the trade-off.

She did advocate for physical characteristics that would lead to the streets being less comfortable for those wanting to do harm and more comfortable and safer for the rest, so that things like avant-guard art and bohemianism can blossom.

But I think even an aesthete like Mennil need not fear that he'll no longer be able to savor others' sef-destruction, despair and death, no matter what is done to the form of the city. Smack and poverty will still be there. Surely gluttony is not his aesthetic, surely a teeny-tiny portion of sorrow and misery,exquisitely prepared, will be even more piquant.
]]> Bill Buchanan http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-05-01T14:17:28-05:00
"It does not diminish the value of the Jacobsian social environment to point out that it posits a healthy neighborhood as a kind of panopticon, with a decided lack of privacy and anonymity."

"Jacobs certainly enabled the interpretation of her work that still predominates within new urbanism and other derivative movements — namely, that certain bourgeois aspects of urban life are consonant with what amounts to a deep and largely unquestioned belief in small-town values."

@ Nick: ... "some of the elements that make up that diversity may not value that particular conception of diversity."

@ Michael: ... "Second, I think you're eliding a distinction between "small-town values" and "small towns." Of course Jacobs didn't see the city as a collection of small towns--but she did very clearly try to inculcate values that are commonly associated with small towns into urban environments that are not necessarily predisposed to them."

@ John: You and others might not characterize Jacobs's values as "small town" ones, as I do, but the larger point is that her idealized city isn't everyone's.

Mr. Mennel doesn't say what "small-town values" he is talking about, but he associates them with New Urbanism. What New Urbanism has taken from Jacobs — and other sources of inspiration including personal observation — are the human benefits of physical characteristics that Jacobs describes. Among these characteristics are "eyes on the street," mixed-use, small blocks, diversity of walking routes, and others. They are as important to the design of small towns or walkable suburbs as they are of cities.

A real question is whether Jacobs's concept of "eyes on the street" is freeing or imprisoning. to Mr. Mennel, is imprisoning — ("panopticon"). So, perhaps, are the shopkeepers and ordinary people who live on the Jacobsian street, who may not understand or feel a degree of hostility toward the eccentrics in Warhol's circle.

Jacobs, new urbanists, and others who have followed in her footsteps have always considered "eyes on the streets" and the other characteristics of the Jacobsian street, to be, on the whole, freeing. They enable people to live, work, and play together. By allowing building types to coexist and the street to be a place where all kinds of people can mix and meet, people can live close to where they work. They also allow the proximity that enables creative people to work together very closely and launch artistic movements. In that sense, important aspects of Jacobs's idealized city are everyone's — although they may not know it. There is no contradiction between Jacobs's view of the city and Warhol's.

The latter could not exist without the former. I think what bothers Mennel is that the former can exist quite nicely without the latter. Warhol is a self-centered and narcissistic luxury, a product of a particular time — and therefore not necessary. Jacobs and all she describes are necessary and will outlast the current celebrity culture. Her view of urban places accurately describes what makes ordinary cities and towns function in basic and exalted ways.
]]> robert steuteville http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-05-01T09:02:44-05:00
@John-- I just want to clarify that I think there's a big difference between what New York is (or can be) and what Jacobs made of it. That was one of my motivations in writing this piece. I lived in New York for about a decade all told and found that what I saw and experienced wasn't always consonant with what Jacobs wanted to find and promote there. You and others might not characterize Jacobs's values as "small town" ones, as I do, but the larger point is that her idealized city isn't everyone's.
]]> Timothy Mennel http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-05-01T02:37:27-05:00
The flip-side of this is Koolhaas reveling in homogeneity:

"But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it's habitable... We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.07/koolhaas.html

"Reveling" itself --or, reducing, fetishizing or what have you-- is the problem here, although hetero/homogeneity in urbanism and how each may effect notions of diversity and freedom is an interesting dialectic/paradox that can lead to many conclusions.

I wouldn't charge Jacobs with reveling-- many of her followers may be guilty of it. Jacobs made sure to mention in Death and Life that it was her methodology not necessarily her conclusions that she wanted people to take home. As far as I can tell she was supremely open to 'other urban possibilities' as long as they came from an engagement with what is actually going on at the level of the street. It seems like it was more important to her that notions of urbanism come from lived experience rather than preconceived ideals than it was that her specific conclusions be validated and adopted. As far as schools of thought go I think it's an encouraging sign that she inspires not just academic discussion but events like Jane's Walk (http://www.janeswalk.net/) that allow continual engagement with her ideas out on the streets, giving both the opportunity to confirm Jacobs original conclusions as well as a chance to come to one's own. There will always be revelers within schools of thought, but I would argue hers is one of the more reflexive and open to reinterpretation.
----]]> Nick Kaufmann http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-04-30T15:18:19-05:00
This is the crux of at least part of your disagreement with Mehaffy - and me.

I was born in New York, I live in New York, and I have the feeling that I would disagree significantly with a list of values that you say are small town rather than big city.

In the case of New York, we're a big place with a lot of different people and attitudes. Speaking for myself, I'm a social moderate and fiscal progressive, but I know I share this city with a lot of others with other opinions, including the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, whose opinions I never agree with.

In the case of Koolhaas, Delerious New York is a brilliant book, but I'd call his nihilism and misanthropy very last century rather than very New York.
]]> John Massengale http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-04-30T12:32:37-05:00
@Jason - Thank you as well. I think you might be overreading me slightly--I don't think Jacobs saw all her neighbors as "cozy" or "midwestern," and I certainly don't think "Jacobs strips individuals of their subjectivity." I do think, though, that her vision of the city is less urbane and heterodox than she claimed. The key issue I would stress here is that "reveling" in heterogeneity--as I agree Jacobs did--can be condescending to the individuals and sensibilities that make up that heterogeneity and thus fail to see the other urban possibilities that they might engender.

@Michael - Clearly I failed to recapitulate your own frazzled perceptions of what Warhol's work consisted of and where his genius lay. I don't recognize the Warhol I was describing in your evident frustration with others' writings--nor do I see what my argument has to do with poststructuralism or with flavors of complexity theory that seem to agitate you. Second, I think you're eliding a distinction between "small-town values" and "small towns." Of course Jacobs didn't see the city as a collection of small towns--but she did very clearly try to inculcate values that are commonly associated with small towns into urban environments that are not necessarily predisposed to them. Last, yes, planners of all sorts might indeed find greater traction in the broader social dialogue if they were able to be less condescending to publics who don't share their values. I've seen that movie before myself, and it, too, is a mess.

]]> Timothy Mennel http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-04-30T01:33:25-05:00
There are a few canards, like this one:

"Jacobs certainly enabled the interpretation of her work that still predominates within new urbanism and other derivative movements — namely, that certain bourgeois aspects of urban life are consonant with what amounts to a deep and largely unquestioned belief in small-town values."

She did? Sorry, this is nonsense! She explicitly rejected the small-town values of, say, Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities -- and for that matter, those of more recent urban planners like Lewis Mumford. She made it clear that big-city neighborhoods are NOT inserted bits of small-town life.

"The true flaw in Jacob's concept of the city, however, is not that she envisions a big-city neighborhood as a small town but that her libertarianism supports the fantasy that urban dwellers will self-interestedly choose that communitarian world over any other; her faith in instinctive cooperation and socially sustaining behavior in contemporary American cities verges on the starry-eyed."

Sorry, this is equally nonsense. It is such an egregious mischaracterization that I have to ask if Mennil really know the lady's work. At the core of her argument was an economic argument as much as any other kind of argument. This was not rooted in faith, but in observation on how real places actually worked, and succeeded or failed. She didn't stop with conjecture, but offered structural hypotheses that could be tested. (Most of them are holding up remarkably well.)

I fear he gets it completely wrong when he calls Jacobs a libertarian. As her book makes clear, she was for subsidized affordable housing, zoning, all kinds of libertarian taboos. However, she was for doing them in a way that actually worked!

Here is where I think Mennil's comparison to Warhol might explain this myopia. Warhol, in his account, seems to be all about poststructuralist "complexity" - which is to say, compounded disorder, and not at all what complexity scientists mean by the term. (Nor what Jacobs meant.) The city has to have its lonely drunks, its depressed suicidal people, and so on. This is the vision of the city, and apparently, of art. What does it mean? Oh, it's beyond semiotics! It's just sheer experience, sensation, what is, revelation of the deconstruction of an artist's constructed meaning into the bare structures of narrative. Sorry, I've seen this movie before, and it's a mess.

The point for Jacobs is that there are indeed ways of actually giving the drunks and the depressed people and the marginal people a choice whether to get out of the slums (or the slums of their lives) and actually find more health. And there are ways to help neighborhoods to have more health. Or less. Who knew?

We do not need to "leave all the lonely drunks alone" because "well you know, that's just what a city is." I fear this is a poststructuralist rationalization of the worst sort -- accomplishing little more than letting an artist write themselves a blank check. (And have a bit of fun in the circus. Warhol was certainly a leader in that field.)

Well, we can tolerate playfulness, absurdity, even irresponsibility when it comes from artists, once in a while at any rate. We don't have to go into their galleries. But we have to live in cities -- all of us, the healthy and the infirm. If we are urbanists, and city-makers, then such actions are affecting people's lives. Leave them be to express the angst of our time, the way it is, etc? If we were doctors, that approach would get us into handcuffs, or malpractice lawsuits.

So it is with the urban malpractice that passes for sophisticated "complexity" today.

Michael Mehaffy ]]> Michael Mehaffy http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-04-29T16:49:47-05:00 Interesting article. But the writer might be drifting a little far afield into meta-community and political implications. In my reading, Jacobs' "Death and Life" was more utilitarian than philosophical. She was primarily concerned with the bread and butter mechanics of daily life in a city. What works, what doesn't. I don't think she presupposed very much about the sensibility of her neighbors, and she certainly didn't cast them as cozy, earnest Midwesterners who defined themselves through their work and were bent on keeping their neighborhoods boring, surveilled, and civil (not that this is such a bad thing). She revels in the heterogeneity of individuals that a city attracts, including immigrants, strivers, and the supposedly eccentric to whom this article accords so much attention. I can see Jacobs' roster of neighborhood businesses as seeming a little quaint -- the butchers, barber shops, social clubs, bank branches, and corner pubs -- but I don't find her appraisal of human behavior quaint at all. She writes at great length about the inevitability of crime in cities, and the ways to moderate its effects on a street. She also writes extensively about slums, and the different overlapping layers of immigrants in her own neighborhood. She talks about squalor and over-crowding, but in a utilitarian way, as something any sensible person would wish to escape.

Jacobs accepts the chaos and swirling complexity of urban life; this is integral to the emergent phenomena she is describing, and antithetical to the systematic utopian planning she is combatting. For Jacobs, cities allow networks and collaborations to form between the like-minded, but they provide plenty of space for individuals to slip back into modern anonymity, if they so wish. I don't see where in all of this Jacobs strips individuals of their subjectivity, eccentricities, artistic license, political autonomy, or actual privacy. She points out that there must be a clear and sharp division between public and private spaces in cities. Punkt. Streets become a panopticon only in the most basic and literal sense -- so that they will not descend into pandemonium, incivility, and violence, which are the antithesis of true freedom. Her panopticon carries no political undertones beyond that most basic premise of the social contract, which sadly is too seldom explicitly stated; namely, that freedom from the fear of violent death is the first and most important precondition for civil society. Jacobs does not purport to solve the problem of alienation in the modern metropolis, but the healthy neighborhoods that she describes certainly don't seem like they would worsen the problem.

So while I admire this writer's thoughtful attempt to contrast Jacobs and Warhol, I don't think he understands Jacobs. Or if he does, he is caricaturing her on behalf of his argument.


]]> Jason Stockmann http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-04-28T18:30:56-05:00
So much of the misunderstandings of Jane Jacobs boil down to assuming she was prescribing the urban village as a vision for what should be the prevailing form in the city. Of course her urban villages such as the North End-- and newer 'middle class nonurban-urban' inventions like Celebration, Fla. are completely different entities, but she wasn't saying either one should be packaged and sold everywhere. While there are trends & schools of thought that promote and romanticize these forms now, which I think are the author's real target for criticism here, that was not what Jacobs was interested in doing.

Jacobs was championing diversity, not togetherness in cities.

She was not promoting the benefits of being a member of a tight-knit urban community to all, but rather explaining the benefits that those communities give to YOU, the anonymous resident, misfit, artistic iconoclast or passerby. Whether it's safety, eyes on the street (they don't have to be yours!), local flavor, people to sit on committees so you don't have to, not to mention the economic benefits that tight-knit ethnic or class-based communities bestow on the city as a whole with their niche industries.

This kind of urban rootedness, your "warm community", actually creates very fertile soil for "cold" communities like Warhol's, precisely because it ALLOWS him and his cohorts to be disengaged from the "issues mentalities and prejudices" (read 'the concerns of everyday life').

Unfortunately there is an impulse to claim that because cities are the only places where this new kind of community can be found, they have or should have nothing to do with other kinds.

You get people like Koolhaas celebrating the "generic city":

"The Generic City is the city liberated from the captivity of center, from the straight jacket of identity. The Generic City breaks with this destructive cycle of dependency: it is nothing but a reflection of present need and present ability. It is the city without history. It is big enough for everybody. It is easy. It does not need maintenance. If it gets too small it just expands. If it gets old it just self-destructs and renews. It is equally exciting – or unexciting – everywhere. It is “superficial” – like a Hollywood studio lot, it can produce a new identity every Monday morning."

Take someplace like Tokyo or Mumbai that seems to fit this description and have a walk through it as Jane Jacobs would have us do, and I think you'll find plenty of 'old fashioned' primary relationships and communal interdependence propping up the dream of the fast-and-free generic city.

I agree with your critique of certain neo-communitarian movements, New Urbanism or other camps as tending to abstract and romanticize community and trying to 'inject it' into places with unintended consequences. But I don't think it's a question of them somehow threatening the anonymity and freedom of the city, which is pretty laughable considering the built-to-order metropolises going up in Asia and the Middle East. I think if anything some of these attempts at 'building community' are a byproduct of the dominance of the generic city and are working under the same logic that says 'we can invent new histories, new identities'. But this is an entirely different activity from trying to preserve and encourage real, diverse communities in cities.

The true freedom of the city is not the ability to eschew rooted social structures but to be able to move through them freely, to sample and embrace their strictures to whatever degree you desire. Favoring mutability to the point that these rooted structures are driven out ultimately ensures that you will only have one to choose from. You can be anything that you want but there is nothing to be.
]]> Nick Kaufmann http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-04-27T20:32:54-05:00 Ian Shimkoviak http://places.designobserver.com/feature/jane-jacobs-andy-warhol-and-the-kind-of-problem-a-community-is/25878/#comments 2011-04-27T16:32:14-05:00